Obama's poke-in-the-eye picks

President Barack Obama’s charm offensive took a brief hiatus this week with his decision to appoint a pair of poke-in-the-eye nominations meant to shore up Democrat support — at the expense of irking his potential new Republican friends.

The big pick, in terms of headline potential and Obama’s personal involvement, came on Thursday morning with the commerce secretary nomination of Chicago financier and longtime Obama campaign fundraiser Penny Pritzker, whose family ties to a subprime lender, offshore bank accounts and the labor strife-wracked Hyatt hotel chain are likely to make for lively confirmation hearings.

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But the more controversial selection — and vastly more consequential in terms of real-world policy decisions — came earlier in the week, when Obama tapped Charlotte, N.C.-area Democratic Rep. Mel Watt to head the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees the wounded housing finance behemoths, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Watt’s hearings are likely to reignite the bitter partisan battle over the fate of twin agencies that Republicans blame for the cataclysm of 2008 — and entities that Democrats view as key weapons in fighting the war on equality of opportunity for homeowners.

Taken together, the new nominations vividly illustrate Obama’s challenging second-term balancing act: The permanent roadblock of the House GOP forces him to build new bridges to Senate Republicans — while his increasing need for financial and political support from Democrats means burning them from time to time.

“In the first term, he was willing to pick Cabinet secretaries he didn’t know very well, for political reasons,” said a longtime Obama strategist, who left his orbit as part of the post-election diaspora. “In the second term, he’s taking more chances, especially when it comes to people he knows and likes personally.”

Reaction to the Pritzker pick among Republicans was muted but not especially friendly.

“Every nominee’s offshore tax avoidance activities should be examined as part of the nomination process,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said in a statement late Thursday. “If the commerce committee doesn’t explore these questions with the nominee, I plan to do so, but I hope the committee will give the tax history a serious look. This is the second nominee in a row, Jack Lew being the first, who’s associated with the kind of tax avoidance activity that the president dismisses as fat cat shenanigans for others. It’s hypocritical to overlook tax avoidance when it’s convenient.”

Neither of these two nominations are likely to flame out, though there are significant risks to a public airing of Pritzker’s compendious financial disclosures. Barring unforeseen disclosures, Pritzker and Watt will most likely be confirmed by fairly narrow majorities, both White House and Senate Republicans predicted to POLITICO, in part, because GOP Senators would be reluctant to filibuster a woman or an African-American.

In nominating Pritzker, a longtime Chicago friend and campaign benefactor, Obama joked about the timing — Thursday is her 54th birthday. “For your birthday, you get to go through confirmation,” Obama said.

“It’s gonna be great,” he added with a mordant grin.

A third nomination, the tapping of former Obama law school classmate Michael Froman for U.S. Trade Representative, is considered far less controversial.

Pritzker’s nomination had been on ice for the past couple of years, in part, because of fears about the resistance she would face at a time when Obama hoped to open new lines of communications to upper-chamber Republicans.

But many people in Obama’s inner circle had concluded that the time had come to act — including a polite but clearly impatient Pritzker, who withdrew her name from consideration in 2008 over concerns about her family’s connection to subprime lending.